


Breaking the Cocoon

by grumpyphoenix



Series: Brain Salad [26]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Dissociation, Mental Illness, Not Beta Read, Pining
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-07
Updated: 2019-02-07
Packaged: 2019-10-23 20:05:42
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 378
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17690024
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/grumpyphoenix/pseuds/grumpyphoenix
Summary: Tony is recovering from an episode.





	Breaking the Cocoon

**Author's Note:**

> Apologies - I've very few hours of sleep in several days. I feel as if I'm lucky this is even in English.

Coming out of an episode is always like emerging from a cocoon. One day, he discovers that he wants to take a shower, and not just the kind of shower that kept him from smelling the way he felt. Those showers were camouflage, to keep people (Pepper) off his back. No one wanted to know what was going on in his head, not really, so if he just smelled fine, and made vapid and vaguely obnoxious comments, everyone kept going. Business as usual. Tony being Tony. 

Anyway, the shower. Hot, scouringly hot, washing everything away. Too much alcohol, too many nights where he got an hour of sleep, _ maximum_, closeted away in his fucking workshop, door locked.

Tony being Tony.

Tony being so  _ intensely  _ Tony that only one person had ever been able to, had wanted to, knock him out of it. He was, of course, gone. Driven away. The thing is, the goddamned hilarity is, if he’d heard that, he’d have been pissed. Tony didn’t get to feel  _ sorry for himself _ that he’d fucked that up, and he knew it. Even his depression was childish.

Always, when he emerges from this kind of shower, he notices that the world has color again; it seeps along the edges and into the cracks of things. Pastel, too light. A hand-painted daguerreotype. He’d find food. He’d find clothing that hadn’t been worn for three days. Four days. A week and a half. 

Even though the color is back, the sense that nothing is real still hovers. It never honestly goes away, but his great big damn brain has realized that it does not matter. If he’s in a simulation (hell), or  a coma (no, he’s in hell), it doesn’t matter. He’s too stubborn to check out, so he might as well keep moving forward.

After the food, clothing that felt like a blessing on his skin, he’d catch up, he’d work. He’d smile at Pepper and make an obligatory pass. Go out to dinner, go to a show, drive his car fast and obnoxious. Fly across the sky. Save a kitten in a tree. 

Maybe this time, he can stay present long enough to really be Tony, and not the projection of Tony. For himself, as much as anyone else.


End file.
